Photos of my studio space at Greenleaf Art Center
Why everything takes me so long
I have been painting seriously since I was fifteen and have had individual works in exhibitions over the years, though nothing recently. There was a hiatus of some years because I didn't have the time to paint or didn't have any space to paint in. Currently I am working in the garage and searching for affordable studio space.In college I started writing poetry and fiction. A few poems have been published though nothing recently or that you could find. One short story is all the fiction published so far. I have another story out on submission and am finishing another. There is a novel about half finished and several others in various degrees of not being completed.
Since 1970 I have worked as a graphic designer and a full time design teacher since 1987. Lettering and letter design was always something I was interested in long before that — in the fifth grade I gave lectures on Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian cuneiform and briefly considered going into archeology or paleography as a career.
When the first font software came out on the Mac — Altsys Fontastic — I immediately started making fonts, and with the introduction of Fontographer began designing type for computers. I have my own digital type foundry and my fonts are commercially available through MyFonts.com and ITC.com.
I am still working on typefaces, converting existing designs to OpenType format and creating new ones.
Really I am only working on three things: painting , writing and type design though each is made up of individual works and projects plus supplemental things like designing web sites for all this, learning Python scripting for font production, making stretchers and stretching canvas for paintings, and endlessly going over projects and refining them. Then there are a couple of books on typography I am trying to write and I also want to turn my teaching lectures into a series of podcasts or webinars.
All this might be easier if I picked one avocation, but I cannot. Even prioritizing things is difficult since I keep constantly coming up with new ideas and new revisions to old ideas. So getting one thing done, anything done, takes time since I'm always working on several things at a time. And from one day to another things change so something I started on a decade ago will suddenly come to the fore and insist that I do something with it. Each day is an adventure.
Whoever first said that ideas have a life of their own was right. They not only have a life, they get very testy if you try to ignore them. It is like having a herd of cats who want to be fed, petted, etc. all at the same time.